Formatting and manuscript preparation

A document can be well written and still fail on presentation: numbering that drifts, a contents page that doesn’t match the headings, figures that move when someone opens the file on a different machine, an index nobody can use.

Making the document behave is exacting, mechanical work, and rarely what an author wants to spend the last week before a deadline on.

What we do

Tables of contents and lists of figures. We generate them from real heading styles, so that they update themselves and stay correct after your next round of changes.

Indexes. We build an index by reading the document and deciding what a reader would look up, rather than by scraping it for keywords.

Figure and table formatting. Captions, numbering, placement, and cross-references, kept consistent throughout.

Bespoke tables and graphs. We build them from your data to match the rest of the document (and each other).

Citation and reference style. We bring citations and reference lists into line with APA, OSCOLA, Chicago, Harvard, Vancouver, or MLA, or with a journal’s own style, and make them consistent from the first entry to the last.

Template compliance. Whether it’s university submission rules, journal requirements, a funder’s template, or your own house template, send us the guidelines and we’ll meet them.

Repairing broken files. Documents that won’t paginate, headings that won’t hold their style, numbering that restarts for no visible reason: usually the underlying styles have been overridden by hand, and we rebuild them.

What it costs

$70 an hour, with an estimate of the hours before we start.

This is the service we can size most accurately, because the work is visible in the document. If the file turns out to hide more damage than it first revealed, we’ll tell you before doing the extra hours.

Working to a standard repeatedly

If your organization produces documents to the same template over and over, it makes sense to set this up once rather than fix it every time. A group account covers the template and gives you access to a small group of editors who will learn your style inside out.

Getting an estimate

Send us the document itself, along with what it has to comply with and when you need it by. We can’t estimate from a description, because how much work a file needs depends on what it looks like when we open it up. If you have a template or a style guide, send that too. If you don’t, let us know, and we’ll recommend one.